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LETTER 



xtMnxi 0f the Ituitctt f tateg 



BY 



J^ HEFTJGtEE. 



G- 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

No8. 715 AXi) 717 Markkt St. 
18 63. 



Extract from a Letter addressed to the President of the United 
States, by the President of a Western University, iDublished in 
the New York Daily Tribune, January 21, 1863. 

" Shall future history make this record of our struggle ? And in 
assigning the causes of this sad issue, shall we say, ' The people were 
at first united, and they raised armies of unexampled numbers, and 
they furnished munitions of war and money without stint ; but all 
was of no avail, because the President was not equal to the emerg- 
ency ; he maintained around him weak and unheroic men, listened to 
the counsels of hackneyed politicians, and committed the army to 
imbecile and unskillful generals. He vacillated between the honest 
wish to save his country and the fear of parties of men who impeded 
his plans and movements, while engaged in insane struggles for 
political mastery, until good men and patriots sank into sullen and 
imbecile despair, and the Republic, like Carthage of old, was split 
into hostile parties, whereof one of the strongest was in league with 
the enemy, while the enemy was thundering at the gates of the 
capital ; and he thus sank ingloriously amid the ruins of his country, 
because he had not the iron will as well as the heart of a Wash- 
ington. In fine, that he was a man whose mercy spared spies, 
traitors, and open enemies, at the expense of the national life- 
blood.' " 

(3) 



LETTER. 



►«^^• 



To Abraham Lincoln, 

President of the United States. 

It is a privilege to which every citizen of the United 
States may claim to be entitled, to express his views on 
matters of public interest, to those who are charged with 
the responsibilities of government. In soliciting, there- 
fore, the attention of the Chief Magistrate of the nation 
to the observations embraced in this communication, I 
trust I may escape the imputation of presumption, how- 
ever I may be esteemed deficient in the modesty which 
should accompany insignificance. I am one whom the 
great rebellion has, in a worldly sense, ruined; one whom 
it found in the possession of a highly honorable position, 
in the quiet pursuit of a favorite and useful profession, 
in the bosom of a delightful social circle, in the enjoyment 
of an income ample enough to satisfy every reasonable 
desire, surrounded by all the comforts and luxuries of 
life, animated by the near prospect of Ijeholding the con- 
summation of golden results to which I had devoted il\Q 
tireless labor of years, and sustained and cheered in the 
discharge of a difficult responsibility and duty, by the 
encouraging voice of a wide circle of influential friends ; 
and whom, in the space of a few short months, it reduced 
to the condition of a homeless wanderer, without an oc- 
cupation, without a prospect, without present means of 
subsistence, and — though life, indeed, remained — without 

(5) 



6 

an object for which to live. By what means I was en- 
abled to escape from the severely-guarded territory of the 
so-called Southern Confederacy, that huge and horrible 
sarcophagus in which lie entombed the murdered hopes 
of thousands whose love for their country was once no 
less glowing than my own, it is unnecessary for me here 
to explain. The fact that I have done so, after having 
witnessed the working out of the giant conspiracy by 
which an entire people were iDctrayed against their will 
into overt acts of treason, and open war upon their coun- 
try, its flag, and its government; and after having had a 
previous opportunity of observing, during the period of 
an entire generation, the careful preparation of the mines 
and magazines, by which it was designed, at the favor- 
able moment, to blow up the entire political fabric — 
mines and magazines which have at length been sprung 
only too successfully — this fact and this experience may 
serve to give to what I have to say a weight which, 
under other circumstances, it might not possess. 

The immediate occasion which has emboldened me to 
the liberty upon which I am venturing, may be briefly 
explained. Not long since, in taking up one of the pa- 
pers of the day, my eye fell upon a printed letter which 
had been addressed to the President of the United States 
by the head of a flourishing Western university. I read 
it with attention — an attention probably the more inter- 
ested because the circumstances and the experiences of 
the writer, as he presented them, exhibited a singular 
series of resemblances and contrasts with my own. 

Your correspondent represents himself in that letter to 
have been, at the opening of the war, in charge of a flour- 
ishing seminary of learning. He saw himself surrounded 
by several hundred noble-spirited youths whom he loved 
with a father's affection, and by whom he was loved in 
return. He saw them suddenly inspired with the martial 



spirit. He could hardly restrain them from rushing in a 
body to the field. . He saw them organized into a battal- 
ion and subjected to military drill. He saw some, impa- 
tient of delay, enlisting in the earliest levies, and fighting 
on the disastrous day of Bull Kun. He has since seen 
many scattered over all the wide arena of conflict, pour- 
ing out their lives for their country, or captured and 
languishing in Southern prisons, or swept off by disease 
in unwholesome camps, or stretched on beds of suffering 
in the homes to which they have returned to die. And 
besides these, he sees others whom the sword has not yet 
reached, nor sickness paralyzed, rallying still to the call 
of that country in whose sacred cause so large a number 
of their youthful brothers have already laid down their 
lives. 

In all this, Mr. President, your correspondent has 
almost literally written down my own history. I, too. 
like him, was charged with the care of a great educa- 
tional institution. I, too, saw around me a band of 
young men numbering some hundreds, whom, for every 
magnanimous and generous quality, I have never seen 
surpassed, and of whose devoted attachment to myself 
I had the most convincing reason to be assured. Like 
him, I saw my charge suddenly electrified with martial 
fire. Like him, I found it next to an impossibiUty to re- 
strain them from rallying as one man to the trumpet call 
of battle. I saw a military organization erected within 
the very halls which we had consecrated to learning, and 
I heard the daily clang of arms beneath the quiet shades 
of our Academus. I saw many, in hot haste, attaching 
themselves to every corps which departed for the scene of 
strife; and I had, subsequently, the unspeakable anguish 
of knowing that more than one had fallen in the fore- 
most of the fight on the bloody banks of Bull Run. I 
have seen others, in every sharply-contested battle which 



8 

has since occurred — at Donelson, at Pittsburg Landing, 
at Malvern Hill, at Corinth, at Antietam, at Murfrees- 
boro'. And I see those whom war has not yet devoured, 
still stubbornly maintaining the conflict into which they 
so early and so impetuously rushed. The parallel be- 
tween my experience and that of my educational com- 
peer, whose letter I have cited, is almost complete. 
There is but this one difference between us — it is a mel- 
ancholy one — that whereas the victims whose untimely 
fate he mourns poured out their lives in the noble 
struggle to uphold the flag of Freedom, mine miserably 
perished in the mad attempt to beat it down. And shall 
I not, therefore, be permitted to lament over so much of 
manly promise blighted, over so much of generous enthu- 
siasm perverted to its ruin? Does any duty bid me to 
repress the natural anguish with which I behold so many 
of the children of my care self-sacrificed on the bloody 
altars of the Demon of Rebellion? Should I not rather 
mourn so much the more deeply, in that the cause for 
which they died presents so little to alleviate the pain — 
even as David mourned over his ingrate child, when he 
went up to the chamber over the gate and wept, saying, 
"0 my son Absalom! Absalom, my son, my son!" 
And may I not reasonably expect that you, Mr. Presi- 
dent, will listen to me, at least, without impatience, 
when I, too, claim, as my educational brother has 
claimed, the right to speak to you over my dead also? 

The sources from which I have drawn my convictions 
of the dangers and the exigencies of the hour have been 
materially different from his. Herein consist some of 
those contrasts, to which I have alluded, between our 
several experiences. He, throughout all the duration of 
this gloomy part, has been happy in the enjoyment of 
the largest liberty. He has found opportunity to visit 
Europe, and there, while enjoying the relaxation and 



9 

pleasures of travel, has gathered up the opinions of 
the people of France and Germany in regard to our na- 
tional affairs, and has listened to the hopes and fears, the 
anxieties and discouragements, of our own fellow-citizens 
abroad, in view of the past history of the war, and of the 
results in which it may possil^l}' terminate. From these 
premises he has drawn conclusions which he has returned 
to lay before you. 

Far different have been my opportunities. Hemmed 
in from the outward world by an unbroken wall of fire, 
I have counted the heavy months as they rolled over my 
head, with the feeling of a prisoner in the condemned 
cells of the inquisition. In the mean time I have seen 
the light of hope die out in hundreds of bosoms, where 
the love of country long survived the inauguration of 
the rebel reign of terror. I have seen the weak, or the 
timorous, or the base, on the most frivolous of pretexts, 
repudiating the sentiments which they had always before 
professed; and with the vociferous zeal of recent converts 
— a zeal always most vociferous when the conversion is 
pretended and the convert a hypocrite — mouthing upon 
the corners of the streets the creed of treason, which, in 
spite of their ostentatious apostacy, they yet loathed in 
their heart of hearts. And I have seen even the men of 
sternest principle — men who through months of anguish 
cherished the hope that the gigantic wickedness which 
had deprived them of a country would yet be stricken 
down by the hand of the government — in despair of re- 
lief, and in obedience to what they esteemed an inexora- 
ble destiny, giving in at length their adhesion to the 
tyranny they could not resist, and hopeless and heart- 
broken bowing their necks to the yoke. I have seen a 
whole country converted into one vast camp; every in- 
dustry suddenly paralyzed, save such as is indispensable 
to human subsistence, or conducive to human destruction; 



10 

every avocation abandoned, save the profession of arms; 
every court of civil jurisdiction practically suspended; 
every court of criminal jurisdiction occupied principally 
with prosecutions for political offenses; and all courts of 
every description often superseded by martial law; all 
education arrested, schools and colleges dissolved, religion 
perverted into an instrumentality for rousing the most 
vindictive passions, and churches prostituted into schools 
for the inculcation of treason. I have seen the wide- 
spread suffering which prevails throughout the insurgent 
States, from the want of many of the simplest comforts 
of life, cut off by the blockade, from the scarcity of sub- 
sistence at home, and from the sudden and universal dry- 
ing up of all the ordinary sources of private income. 
And, if to these things it is added that I have had the 
advantage of observing a portion, at least, of the military 
operations of the past two years, from an interior point 
of view, it may possibly appear that my opportunities of 
forming a judgment of the existing situation have been 
as favorable as if I had watched the progress of events 
through the eyes of the people of Europe, or had derived 
my convictions from the complaints of our ill success 
which are sent home to us from the pleasant watering- 
places of Germany, or the gay cities of France, by our 
own faineants fellow-citizens. 

I have not the presumption, Mr. President, to come to 
you with counsels. Looking at the actual military posi- 
tion as it stands, I do not think you need them. Look- 
ing at the political aspect of affairs, I do not believe that 
any counsel addressed to you, however wise, or any wis- 
dom of your own, however profound, could avail in the 
least to mend it. I will not, therefore, pain you by im- 
puting the imperfect success of the national arms hith- 
erto, to any past policy or change of policy of yours. Had 
your course been different, it is by no means evident that 



11 

better results would have followed, or that the voice of 
discontent would have been any less loud than it is to- 
day. Nor, on the other hand, will I do you the injustice 
to assume that it is you only who are wanting to the 
emergency of the present hour; or to call on you for the 
sudden manifestation of an energy so startling, so resist- 
less — in a word, so superhuman — as that by which your 
correspondent, whom I have quoted, seems to demand 
that you should extinguish this gigantic rebellion, and 
bring back peace to our distracted land in a few brief 
days or months. If I am right in my convictions, the 
gravity of the present crisis is not owing to any fault of 
yours or of your administration. The danger which im- 
pends over the nation is one which no new vigor dis- 
played by yourself, no new men called to your counsels, 
no new generals set over your armies, no new measures 
adopted in the cabinet or in the field, have power to 
reach or to conjure down. The leaven of treason is at 
work in the heart of loyal communities, the demon of 
rebellion is lurking in secret places among our own 
valleys and hills, and the hour may, at any moment, 
sound, when the crimson deluge which has already 
rolled over Virginia, and Tennessee, and Mississippi, 
and Arkansas, and Missouri, shall burst upon the States 
north of the Ohio. 

I have been a witness to the entire process by which 
the people of the insurgent States were betrayed to their 
ruin. I see the same instrumentalities resorted to to- 
day, to bring down the same ruin upon the unsuspecting 
North. The dark conspirators are too wary to declare 
their purpose in advance. They seek to lull suspicion 
by setting themselves up as the foremost champions of 
the Constitution they aim to subvert. They denounce, 
with furious violence, measures absolutely indispensable 
to preserve the government from overthrow. They de- 



12 

mand for rebels in arms every right to which loyal citi- 
zens are entitled. According to them, it is unconstitu- 
tional to touch the property which gives to insurgent 
traitors the power to be mischievous. It is unconstitu- 
tional to restrain traitors among ourselves of the liberty 
which they employ in organizing bands to obstruct the 
movements of national troops, even on their way to de- 
fend the national capital. It is unconstitutional to aid, 
by legislation, a loyal State, in ridding itself of a political 
ulcer, whose rottenness, where it has been allowed to run 
its course, has corrupted the whole body politic, and has 
nearly cost the nation its life. It is unconstitutional, 
in short, to do anything to save the Constitution; and 
nothing is constitutional but the right to subvert the 
Constitution. Thus, open and violent resistance to the 
authorities which the Constitution itself has created is 
inculcated as the legitimate and proper and even obliga- 
tory means of upholding the Constitution ; and revolution 
is urged as the only possible means of saving the country. 
The success with which this insidious system has been 
practiced in South Carolina and the States bordering on 
the Gulf of Mexico is too well known of all mankind to 
require proof It may serve, however, to illustrate the 
tergiversations of dishonest politicians, to call to mind in 
how many instances the very same measures have been 
at one time or another constitutional or unconstitutional 
■with them, according as it might serve the purpose of 
the hour. Thus a protective tariff was unconstitutional, 
though the principle originated in South Carolina; the 
Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, though it was 
conceded to the South as the price of peace; the Wilmot 
Proviso was unconstitutional, though it was approved by 
a Southern President in the territorial bill for Oregon; 
the principle of popular sovereignty in the Territories 
was unconstitutional, though it was the platform of the 



13 

South in the jd residential canvass of 1848; and even in 
these latter years, the laws suppressing the African slave- 
trade have become both unconstitutional and oppressive, 
to the extent of justifying violent revolution,* though 
to any reader of ordinary common sense the Constitution 
explicitly authorizes their enactment. 

In all this prating about the Constitution the latent de- 
sign of traitors. North and South, has ever been one and 
the same. It was, and is, this and no other, by artful 
sophistry and persistent misrepresentation to alarm the 
people into the belief that their rights or their liberties 
are in danger from their own servants; to excite them to 
unreasoning fury against the very government which the 
Constitution itself has provided; and when at length the 
delirium seems to have reached a height sufficient to 
make the next step secure, to precipitate them into a rev- 
olution of which they, the instigators, may reap the per- 
sonal advantages, in the possession of place, and power, 
and plunder, while all the country around them writhes 
in anguish and welters in blood. Thus the people of 
the insurgent States were craftily but too successfully 
assailed on the side of their very virtues; and thus they 
were insidiously driven, by appeals to their patriotism 
itself, to drag down upon their country the avalanche of 
ghastly ruin under which it lies crushed and bleeding 
to-day. Shall these acts be a second time successful ? 
Shall our own people, too, with the history of the horri- 
ble past before their eyes, with a hundred fields yet red 
with their brothers' blood to tell them what deadly gifts 
are those which these Greek givers bring; shall they de- 
liberately walk into the snare that is thus spread to en- 
tangle them, and join in the mad work of destroying 

* Such was the ground taken by the principal orators at the last of 
the Southern commercial conventions, held at Vicksburg, in May, 1859. 



14 

their country under the miserable delusion that they are 
saving it? These questions, Mr. President, may seem to 
many to betray an apprehension which has no reasonable 
foundation, or at least to originate in an extravagant 
exaggeration of the many omens of evil with which the 
time is pregnant. And herein consists one of our great- 
est dangers. It is the feeling of fond security in which 
our loyal multitudes live on from day to day, which ex- 
poses them to become the easy victims of the traitors 
who are plotting their ruin. They go on buying and 
selling, and eating and drinking, and marrying and 
giving in marriage, even as did men in the days of 
Noah ; and as in those days, too, their first just sense of 
their situation seems likely to come with the bursting of 
the flood which is to destroy them. No man who has 
seen near at hand, as I have, the treachery which be- 
trayed Tennessee, and the fraud which delivered Vir- 
ginia over to her tormentors — Virginia, once the proud 
mother of States, now the pliant tool and unhappy cat's- 
paw in the hands of South Carolina — will say that I 
exaggerate the danger of the loyal North to-day. 

But besides this wicked and fraudulent abuse of the 
people's reverence for their political constitution, and 
their jealousy of their political rights, there is another of 
the arts of the Southern traitors and conspirators which 
is being energetically, and not quite unsuccessfully, em- 
ployed among us. It is probable that, however wild 
may have been the excitement aroused by convictions of 
imaginary wrongs under the Constitution, this excite- 
ment never could have culminated in actual open war 
had there not been sedulously cultivated along with it an 
intensely embittered hatred on the part of the Southern 
people toward their fellow-citizens of the North. This 
bitterness, to those who have had no opportunity to wit- 
ness its manifestations in its birth-place, is such as to defy 



15 

all power of conception. It is probable that, since time 
began, there has never been an example of the hatred of 
one people for another so measureless in degree, so un- 
fathomable in depth, so utterly groundless in fact, and so 
intensely absurd in its alleged causes, as the hatred of 
the people of the South, and especially of South Caro- 
lina, for the people of the North, and especially of New 
England. To foster and cherish, to exasperate and ex- 
acerbate, this hatred has been one of the objects to which 
Southern demagogues have for years past devoted their 
most earnest and untiring labors. And in the crisis of 
their criminal conspiracy it proved the wisdom of their 
wicked prevision, and served them well. The anger 
which is awakened by a sense of wrong has something 
noble in its character; but the spirit of malignant vin- 
dictiveness which is the offspring of hatred is nothing 
less than diabolical. It was not, therefore, merely the 
desire to vindicate their rights which led the people of 
the South to follow with so little hesitation their treach- 
erous leaders into the gulf of insurrection; it was even 
still more the insatiable thirst to see their desire upon 
their enemies. And in saying this I do not mean to in- 
timate that the mass of the Southern people anticipated 
ivar as a consequence of secession, or looked forward to 
the desolation of the North by fire and sword borne by 
their own hands. On the contrary, they very generally 
believed that the measure, however hostile to the national 
government it might be in form, would be practically 
peaceful in fact. They had not the slightest conception 
of the resources of the North, of its power or of its spirit. 
They esteemed it to be abjectly dependent on them for 
the means of daily subsistence. They said, exultingly, 
" Let us refuse our cotton to the wretched Yankees and 
cut them off from our trade, and in six months universal 
ruin will sweep over their whole land. Famishing mobs 



16 

will rush frantically through the streets of Northern 
cities, roaring for bread or blood; famishing operatives 
will storm the stately mansions of manufacturing lords, 
demanding money or work; everywhere ferocious eyes 
will glare upon the men whom the spoil of the South 
has made fat; everywhere hoarse voices will be heard 
demanding purses or menacing death; the Nemesis which 
years of covetousness, robbery, and political injustice 
have at length evoked, will wreak a terrible retribution 
on the heads of the guilty, and the bitter wrongs of the in- 
jured and insulted South will at last be signally avenged." 

There is not the slightest exaggeration in this state- 
ment. I but repeat literally what, during the early days 
of the rebellion, I heard on every side from men of every 
class — from the self sufficient planter and from the "white 
trash," who are but slaves of lighter hue, alike — from the 
ignorant, and the stupid, and the silly of course; but, 
strange as it may seem, from the intelligent, and the edu- 
cated, and, on other subjects, the men of common sense 
also. 

And it is one of the favorite instrumentalities em- 
ployed by our traitors, with the hope of a similar success 
here, to fan the flame of an imaginary mutual dislike be- 
tween the East and the West. They denounce New 
England as the cause of a rebellion which was conceived 
in South Carolina thirty years ago; which became almost 
overt even then; but whose authors, frightened for the 
moment from their purpose, postponed the development 
to a more favorable hour. That hour they once more 
believed to have arrived in 1850. At the last moment 
they became again alarmed. The popular madness had 
not yet quite reached the hoped-for height, and again 
they dropped the half-lifted vail. Yet though, when two 
years ago they found themselves, through the perfect or- 
ganization which they had instituted, through the entire 



17 

control which they possessed of all the machinery of State 
governments from Virginia to Louisiana, and through the 
active complicity in their dark conspiracy of the chief 
executive officers in all those States, fully masters of the 
situation, and perceived the time to be entirely ripe, in 
raising at length boldly the standard of open revolt, they 
avowed exultingly the fact that all this monstrous trea- 
son had been deliberately premeditated, plotted, and 
matured during a period of thirty years, we have men 
among us to-day false enough, and wicked enough, and 
brazen enough to assert that the rebellion is the recent 
work of New England. And how did she accomplish it? 
Did New England beleaguer a Federal garrison? Did 
New England fire upon a Federal fortress ? Did New 
England seize the public treasure w^ithin her borders? 
Did New England possess herself of the arsenals, the 
mints, the custom-houses, the navy-yards, the ports and 
the revenue-cutters upon the whole line of coast ? Oh, 
no ! New England did nothing at all of this ; but New 
England entertained some opinions displeasing to South 
Carolina; New England had really an old-fashioned be- 
lief in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence ; 
New England had a prejudice in favor of free speech and 
a free press, things intolerable to South Carolinians and 
unknown in their State; and New England, by the ex- 
ercise of these rights, sometimes made South Carolina 
angry — in fact, very angry indeed. That an independent 
sovereignty, every one of whose citizens is a gentleman, 
should suffer such affronts from a rabble of mud-sills, and 
men who work with their own hands, and 3^et not be 
driven by an inexorable necessity to rebel against the gov- 
ernment on that account, is of course a preposterous sup- 
position. There is no necessity to pursue the argument. 
Yet, while admitting the exceeding naughtiness of the 
culprit section, and abandoning as hopeless the idea of 

2 



18 

impeaching the energetic action of States whom her in- 
excusable conduct and more inexcusable convictions and 
sentiments have coerced into revolt, Twill not do her the 
injustice to deny the fact, that in her errors and her here- 
sies she is only censurable in that she is behind the time : 
that her bizarre and mischievous notions are only the 
notions of Washington and his contemporary patriots, 
whose reading of the Bible was probably limited, and 
whose acquaintance with the true principles of political 
and social science was obscure and imperfect to the last 
deo-ree; that she is under the delusion which seems to 
have guided the pen of Jefferson, when he wrote of the 
gigantic blot upon the social system of Virginia, "I 
tremble for my country when I remember that God is 
just, and that his justice will not sleep forever;" and 
that she partakes of those strong, but, as we now know, 
totally unfounded prejudices, under the influence of 
which Henry Clay, a native of Virginia and a senator 
from Kentucky, once excited at the same time the mirth 
and the indignation and the disgust of every gentleman 
who heard him, and whose education had not been en- 
tirely neglected, by making the extraordinary declaration, 
"I will maintain all the guarantees which the Constitu- 
tion provides for slavery where it exists ; hut when it is 
^woposed to extend the curse into soil yet free, I never will 
give my consent to the monstrous proposition — no, Mr. 
President, never, never, NEVER !" 

If I read aright the indications of public sentiment, 
these assaults upon New England have not been alto- 
gether without their effect. The men who originated 
them, and who devote themselves, sleeping and waking, 
to their prosecution, are not avoided, as it might be 
reasonably expected that they would be, by every respect- 
able man whom they meet in the streets. The papers 
which daily reek with them are not all promptly thrust, 



19 

as decency would seem to require that they should be, 
into the next cesspool, to rot with the kindred filth that 
is gathered there. Even those who know most thor- 
oughly their baseness, and feel most deeply their false- 
hood, manifest little of the active indignation which 
they ought to evoke, make scarcely an effort to repel the 
calumnies, and lift hardly a finger to arrest the deadly 
poison which they are slowly infusing into our body 
politic. 

Are our people aware of the malignity of this poison? 
or of the suddenness with which it is capable of pro- 
ducing its fatal effects? If, on these points, they need 
enlightenment, let them turn their eyes to those two or 
three yet loyal States, whose executive or legislative au- 
thorities are at this moment almost as completely in the 
hands of disloyal men as were those of unhappy Tennes- 
see the day before she was betrayed. Let them ask them- 
selves how the proposition to negotiate a peace independ- 
ently of the national government, and in spite of it. 
comports with those loud denunciations of vioLations of 
the Constitution, of which no one that has been named 
approaches to this in flagrancy and daring. Let them 
ask themselves how the declaration set forth by a State 
legislature, of a purpose to resist the collection of taxes 
levied for objects which they happen not to apjDrove, 
how denunciations, from the same source, of the military 
measures deemed by the government to be indispensable 
to the successful prosecution of the war, and how direct 
attempts, from the same source still, to excite our armies 
in the field to insubordination and mutiny, and thus lay 
open all our frontier to invasion and ravage, consist with 
any other supposition than that their mad and disloyal 
authors are plotting the practical destruction of the gov- 
ernment — a destruction which they mean to accompUsli, 
peaceably if they can, forcibly if they must. 



20 

Precisely the same machinery is being employed by 
Northern traitors which was successful in the South. 
State authorities are set up against the government of 
the whole country. Local State pride is enlisted. Sec- 
tional jealousies are enkindled. A conflict is kept up 
which is designed to last long enough to generate a degree 
of exasperation among the people sufficient to render the 
experiment safe ; and then, suddenly, the central power 
is to be defied, and the revolution made complete. This 
method of inaugurating rebellion is the most insidiously 
dangerous that was ever contrived. It apes the forms of 
legitimate proceeding to an extent which imposes on law- 
abiding citizens, who presently find themselves rebels 
without their own consent. And it is a species of rebel- 
lion, strong in possession from the start of all the regu- 
lar organization of an established State. Any unhappy 
recusants among a people so betrayed are deprived of 
even the equal chance which, in rebellions elsewhere, be- 
long to the persistently loyal, of striking for their inde- 
pendence; for, without organization themselves, they are 
surrounded, from the earliest moment, by an organized 
police, who repress the first indication of disaffection by 
arrests, imprisonments, and executions under the forms 
of law, or are subjected to the violence of mobs, who 
proceed, with the encouragement of the authorities them- 
selves, to hang or mutilate without any regard to law at 

all. 

And here we have the obvious and rational explanation 
of a political phenomenon which has excited the special 
admiration of Mr. Kussell and other foreign observers, 
viz., the singular and beautiful unanimity which the in- 
surgent people have displayed in their ill-omened cause. 
Such observers have even remarked, apparently without 
drawing the unavoidable inference, that this unanimity 
extends no less to the immigrants and adventurers from 



21 

foreign lands, too recently arrived in the country to be 
able to comprehend in the least the alleged causes of 
grievance, than to the people who are native and to the 
manor born. Indeed, it may be safely said that there 
never occurred a rebellion, since history began, in which 
the insurgent chiefs, from the earliest hour of their 
usurj)ed authority, were able to command a machinery so 
comprehensive, so resistless, so thoroughly effectual for 
securing unanimity among their wronged and betrayed 
victims, as the Southern conspirators found ready made 
to their hands in the State organizations. Even before 
the melancholy farce of secession had been enacted in any 
single State, these authorities were thoroughly prosti- 
tuted to the uses of the consjDirators. Citizens who still 
loved their country were menaced and insulted, in many 
instances assaulted with actual violence ; yet they dared 
not appeal to the ministers of the law for protection, for 
they knew too well that law had no longer any protection 
for them. On the other hand, the ruffians who thus com- 
menced the work of preparing a unanimous peoj^le in ad- 
vance of the hour appointed, were as entirely untram- 
meled by any fear of consequences to themselves, as the 
roving bands of Bedouins who plunder helpless travelers 
in the desert. 

In one particular our Northern conspirators have an 
advantage over the Southern traitors whom they imi- 
tate, and with whom they are possibly in league. The 
Southern people had no war upon their lands ; and what 
made it chiefly a difficult task to goad them into secession 
was the grim prospect that with secession war might 
come. We liave a war existing, whose oppressiveness is 
felt by all. The promise of peace to be restored by de- 
stroying the power of the government to continue the 
war, is, if artfully managed, a most enticing mode of en- 
trapping men into sedition. We see it now employed 



22 

with indefatigable zeal and industry. There are parts of 
the country where its effects have been already pernicious 
to the last degree. And in saying this, I do not mean to 
confine the remark exclusively to tbe political evil it has 
produced. I allude no less to that monstrous demoraliza- 
tion of public sentiment, which appears in the infamous 
terms on which those who are engaged in this work un- 
blushingly avow their purpose to purchase peace. They 
propose to give new guarantees to slavery; to wipe out the 
black and bloody record of the past two years; to receive 
to their arms and to their bosoms red-handed traitors 
reeking from the slaughter of their own sons and brothers ; 
and, finally, to expel New England from the Union. In 
all this programme there is not a feature, of which even 
so much as for one moment to think, ought not to suffuse 
the cheek of aiiy honorable man or honest patriot with 
the burning blush of shame. New guarantees to slavery ! 
And what guarantees can be given which have not been 
given already, except to legalize slavery in every State of 
the Union? There is no other, certainly, which the 
rebels themselves would for a moment consider. Nor are 
they going to be content with a mere legalization on 
paper. They will demand, and they will see well to it 
that the demand is realized, that the legalization shall 
be an actual, visible, tangible fact. And this is precisely 
what our Northern conspirators intend to make it. So 
lost are they to honor, so dead to shame, so steeled 
against conscience, so abandoned even of the commonest 
self-respect, that they stand ready to-day, in the face of 
all mankind, and under the clear illumination of the nine- 
teenth century, to fasten upon a great and free people 
the ineffable, indelible, and damning disgrace of delib- 
erately and intentionally engrafting upon their political 
institutions that relic of j)rimeval barbarism, that loath- 
some monument of the brutality and ferocity of the 



23 

ages of darkness, that monster injustice — cursed of all 
Cliristian men and hated of God — domestic slavery. 
History will be searched in vain for a parallel to the 
gigantic crime here meditated, or the immeasurable base- 
ness which suggested it. Traitors have been false to 
their country before ; but here are traitors who have con- 
trived to be false at once to their country, to civilization, 
to humanity, and to God. Let them be successful, and 
America will become the just object of the scorn and de- 
rision, the contempt and loathing of all civilized man- 
kind while time endures. Hitherto the vast system of 
serfdom within her limits has been excused to her as her 
misfortune rather than severely censured as her fault. 
To inherit the burden and the curse, and to perpetuate 
it when relief seemed hopeless, was certainly not a crime; 
but deliberately to choose it, to introduce it, to welcome 
it where it had no existence before, surely this is " the 
sum of all villainies." And if anything could possibly 
be wanting to the blackness of the guilt or the immen- 
sity of the baseness of such an act, it may be found in 
the motive for which it is to be done, and in the chain of 
incidental humiliations which it draws after it. The aim 
is to purchase peace with rebels at any cost ; and to this 
end it is shamelessly proj^osed to yield them more than 
they demanded when they took up arms ; to humble be- 
fore them the majesty of the government; to surrender, 
in fact, substantially, the very government itself into 
their hands ; and, Avith a meanness of spirit which has 
no example among nations, to accept for Northern free- 
men the menial position which Southern arrogance has 
assigned them, and to acknowledge those insolent lords 
of the lash to be their natural masters. And all this, 
without any compensation for tliose stupendous sacrifices 
which this wronged and insulted nation has made of its 
wealth and its life ; without any expiation for the mj'riad 



24 

murders for wliicli the authors of this horrible war are 
responsil)le ; without any provision of rehef from the 
mountain of debt which it has rolled up ; without, in 
short, any return whatever for the humiliation to which 
we subject ourselves, except the advantage and benefit 
of being merely kicked and spit uj)on, instead of being 
menaced with fire and sword. 

And what shall we say of the proposition to expel New 
England? Coming as it does from men whose watch- 
word is " The Union as it was," it affords the happiest 
of practical commentaries on their truth and their 
honesty. The Union as it ivas, with six of the States 
omitted — four of them being of the original thirteen by 
which the Union was formed ! And this proposition, 
moreover, comes from the champions, ^^ar excellence, of 
the rights conferred by the Constitution. Men who 
writhe with an anguish not to be told, at the bare thought 
that a rebel's title to his property may be impaired by 
the innocent fact of his waging war against the govern- 
ment, propose, with a deliberate assurance worthy of all 
admiration, to deprive six entire States — say some three 
to four millions of loyal citizens — of every right which 
they j)ossess under the Constitution. 

But apart from the absurdity and folly of this propo- 
sition, or worse than that, the villainy and the treason 
lurking beneath it, it cannot be denied that it embodies 
an unintentional compliment to the New England States, 
the highest which men without principle, men without 
honor, men without patriotism, could possibly pay her. 
Assuming it to be possible — and for making such an as- 
sumption, even for a moment, I very humbly solicit par- 
don, in advance, of the States concerned — but assuming 
it to be possible that the remaining States, as yet non- 
slaveholding, could yield themselves to the deep degrada- 
tion which these men are preparing for them, the conspir- 



25 

ators perceive, by intuition, that such States could no 
longer be fit society for New England. The thought that 
New England herself could possibly stoop to the same 
shameful level — that any cajolery could inveigle, or any 
hope of gain could corrupt, or any apprehension of dan- 
ger could intimidate her to sully her yet unspotted gar- 
ments with the moral filth in which they will have con- 
demned themselves to wallow, never once crosses their 
minds. If it did, why should they reject her ? If New 
England could be mean enough, and cringing enough, and 
servile enough, and morally despicable enough, to do 
what these shameless plotters design that her sister States 
shall do, would she not be worth having ? If she would 
bend her proud neck meekly to the yoke, would she not 
be a useful beast of burden ? If she would but trem- 
blingly kiss the rod held out to smite her, would she not 
make a valuable slave ? Compared in any point of view, 
six States like South Carolina are not worth the sixth 
part of one like Massachusetts; and if Massachusetts and 
her sister States of New England could be moulded to 
their will, is it for a moment to be imagined that these 
reckless conspirators, who are as mercenary and mean as 
they are unprincipled and base, would lightly throw her 
away ? But such a thought never occurs to them. New 
England thanks them for it. So wide is the gulf that 
stretches between her and them, that there is but one 
conceivable favor they could render her, and they have 
rendered it; it is that they should never so much as 
imagine that this gulf could, by any possibility, be made 
a hair's-breadth less. 

New England does not intend to be left out of the 
Union. New England does not intend that the Union 
shall be humbled at the feet of rebels, or prostituted to 
the base uses of the slaveholding power. New England 
does not believe that her noble sister States of the Atlan- 



26 

tic coast, or of the lakes, or of the great Northwest, will 
permit themselves to be subjected to the ignominy which 
these traitors are preparing for them. But one thing is 
certain, if these her strong convictions, if this her firm 
confidence shall prove to be unfounded; if this deep dis- 
grace which is now only threatened shall prove to be a 
reality ; if all the free millions between her and the set- 
ting sun are to shrivel into dastards, and the lash of the 
slave-driver is to become a familiar sound upon the blue 
shores of Erie and upon the green banks of the Hudson, — 
then no formal act of exclusion will be necessary; no 
barricade of paper need be erected; no barrier of bayonets 
need be arrayed, to keep New England out of a Union so 
blacl^ with guilt, so steeped in infamy as this Union will 
have become. No, indeed ! the difficulty in such a case 
would rather be to keep New England in ! Loyal to the 
government, loyal to the Constitution, loyal to every duty 
which she owes to her sister States, she will do anything, 
and suffer anything, except be false to honor and to God, 
before she will relinquish one right which belongs to her 
under the Constitution, or permit the dissolution of the 
sacred bond which makes all these States one. But when 
the Constitution itself is practically abrogated, and among 
the faithless she alone remains faithful to the cause of 
human right which it was designed to protect, she will 
repudiate with scorn and indignation all political con- 
nection or association whatever, no matter how urgently 
her alliance may be sought, with the miscreants who 
will thus have murdered Freedom in her own temple. 

Ah, yes, traitors, you do well to announce in advance 
your purpose to exclude New England! Be assured 
that, if you did not do so, she would most unhesitatingly 
and most unceremoniously exclude you. And in the 
event of such a separation, who would be the loser ? Not 
New England certainly. Her political importance might 



27 

be abridged, her wealth diminished, but nothing could be 
more greatly grand, more magnificent in moral sublimity, 
than the attitude she would hold before the nations — 
condemned to isolation for her love of liberty! And no 
radiance could shine more lustrously than the light of 
her unspotted purity, as to the eyes of civilized Europe 
it would appear relieved upon the dark ocean of political 
iniquity rolling beyond ! What, then, though from the 
rupture of ancient ties and the hostile legislation of 
former friends her material interests might and would 
doubtless deeply suffer — her very sacrifices would consti- 
tute her highest glory, and would only swell the exulta- 
tion with which her steadfast sons would shout to the 
appalled witnesses of a nation's moral death, " Be not 
dismayed; Freedom still lives; her home is yet here!" 

But no such separation is possible. The people of Illi- 
nois, the people of Indiana, the people of Ohio, are not 
prepared to accept the ignominy into which the dark 
conspirators in those States are plotting to entrap them. 
There is no shadow of a doubt that the vast majority 
among them possess as lofty a sense of self-respect and 
as devoted a love of freedom as the people of New 
England. How could it be otherwise, when, to a great 
extent, they are but another New England transplanted 
to Western soil ? It is not from the people themselves, 
by any means, that the danger which, as I believe, im- 
pends over us to-day, proceeds. It is from those men 
who have, to a great extent, secured control of the power- 
ful machinery by which the people may be first betrayed, 
and then coerced. The people of Tennessee were largely 
loyal to the Union — loyal in the proportion, at least, of 
two to one — when, in defiance of the popular vote, and 
in utter disregard of those outwardly decorous forms 
which rebellion had, up to that time, observed, it was, by 
its own legislature, plunged into the vortex of revolution, 



28 

and delivered into the power of the despotism organized 
at Montgomery. Our danger to-day is from a similar 
species of legislative usurpation. Not that I believe that 
such usurpation could be successful in Illinois as it was 
in Tennessee, but that the conspirators, sanguine that 
it might be so, may be tempted, should opportunity 
seem to favor the madness, to strike the hazardous blow. 
But though an act like this would, beyond a question, 
result in a manner to astonish and confound its perpe- 
trators, though it would rouse the sleeping lion of the 
Northwest to hunt them from the soil they had dis- 
graced, and drive them howling to their own place be- 
yond the Tennessee; yet there can be no doubt that the 
civil war which it would temporarily inaugurate upon 
our own soil would seriously embarrass the government 
in its efforts to crush the already existing rebellion, and 
would so far weaken our armies as to enable the South- 
ern insurgents to remove the scene of conflict from their 
own exhausted territory to ours. And this is the result 
which, next to a complete success immediately secured, 
our Northern traitors chiefly desire. With the invasion 
of the North by the Southern armies must, in their 
view, shortly come one of two things : either the com- 
plete triumph of the rebellion, and the substitution of 
the Richmond for the Washington government — after 
which will come the reconstruction of the Union, with 
special attention to the case of New England, as already 
set forth; or else a peace accepted by the government at 
Washington at the dictation of the insurgent chiefs, in 
which the independence of the Southern Confederacy is 
to be acknowledged, with boundaries fixed by itself. 

And this is our danger at this moment. It is the dan- 
ger of the time. Our armies were never so strong as 
they are now. Our navy never was so efficient. If the 
operations in progress are slow, they are, nevertheless, 



29 

sure. The resources of the rebels have been stretched to 
the point of exhaustion. Every man and boy capable 
of bearing arms among them has been driven into the 
field by the most sweeping and merciless conscription the 
world ever saw. The natural sources of nitre which 
exist within their borders are capable of but a limited 
supply, and yield probably at present not a tithe of what 
they need; while a blockade, more severe than ever be- 
fore, effectually neutralizes the efforts of foreign sympa- 
thizers for their relief. It is morally impossible that we 
should fail, from this time forward, steadily to gain upon 
the insurrection, until it is effectually crushed out, ex- 
tinguished, dead and buried. But this implies and re- 
quires that while our armies are busy in the field, and 
our navy along our coast and rivers, pushing back, inch 
by inch, the rebel battalions, and extending steadily the 
jurisdiction of the legitimate government over recon- 
quered soil, we should not permit a new rebellion to 
burst forth in their rear, to break up their base of opera- 
tions and cut off" their sources of supplies. 

The situation of things, then, Mr. President, is not, in 
my view, one for the evils or dangers of which — and they 
are certainly grave — ^you can justly be held responsible; 
nor are they evils or dangers which it would appear to be 
quite in your power to control. They are evils and dan- 
gers which can only be removed or neutralized by the 
earnest efforts of good men and loyal men everywhere, to 
expose, disarm, and trample under foot the treason which 
is lurking even in the capitals of loyal States, watching 
the favorable moment to betray the sacred cause of hu- 
manity and of liberty in its own home. If all such men 
will but realize the gravity of the crisis, and simjjly ac- 
quit themselves of their duty, the symptoms in the 
political sky, which now so justly excite anxiety and 
alarm, will speedily disappear. If they will not, it 



30 

passes human prescience to tell in what condition an- 
other twelvemonth may find our unhappy country. 

But should the worst arrive, and should a revolution- 
ary chaos swallow up this majestic political fabric, bury- 
ing in its ruins the dearest hopes of the human race for 
ages, I, for one, desire to enter my protest in advance 
against any such inscription upon the page of future his- 
tory as that in which your former correspondent, whom 
I have quoted, has foreshadowed the verdict of posterity 
upon the calamities of this miserable period. Nor do I 
believe that any such verdict will be recorded there. If 
I might be permitted, in my turn, to glance down the 
vista of time, and to interpret the characters in which I 
seem to see the fatal narrative traced, my version of the 
calamity and its causes would run somewhat thus : — 

"The year 1862 opened auspiciously for the cause of 
the Union. Its arms were everywhere successful — every- 
where its flag advanced. Disastrously defeated on the 
banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee, the rebels has- 
tily withdrew from all their advanced posts in the West, 
and fell back to the borders of the State of Mississippi. 
The important City of Nashville fell. Most of the im- 
portant towns and harbors of the Atlantic sea-board and 
of the Gulf were captured and held by the Federal forces. 
The great navy-yards of Norfolk and Pensacola were re- 
covered. The Union flag waved once more over New Or- 
leans. The whole Mississippi River, with the exception 
of a single point, passed under the complete control of the 
Federal flotillas. In view of these multiplied disasters, 
the rebels were seized with dismay. Hopeless discourage- 
ment appeared in every countenance. Their wretched 
people, left to themselves, would speedily have abandoned 
the conflict ; but the leaders, rendered desperate by the 
urgency of the crisis, resisted with the obstinacy of men 
wdio see the gallows staring them in the face. They re- 



oi 

sorted to a conscription, sweeping and merciless to a de- 
gree unknown in all the history of tyrannies. They pur- 
sued and punished the disaffected with a vindictiveness 
which appalled and crushed out opposition. Thus in- 
subordination was promptly checked, and their rapidly 
recruited armies soon found themselves numerically 
superior to the forces opposed to them. Then, in turn, 
the Federals were at some points driven back. A series 
of disasters in Virginia unreasonably discouraged a por- 
tion of the American people, and furnished to secret 
sympathizers with the rebellion, of whom there were 
always many in the loyal States, a favorable opportunity 
to excite, by all the insidious arts which demagogues 
know how to employ, discontent with the administration. 
It was not very difficult to mould a popular chagrin, not 
unnatural under public reverses, into disaffection toward 
the men who were at the head of public affairs; nor very 
much more so to turn against the government itself the 
disaffection which was at first directed toward men. 
Accordingly, although the President, by wise and prudent 
measures, soon succeeded in correcting all the evils which 
had accrued from previous disasters, and had so ordered 
affairs as to insure, beyond reasonable doubt, the early 
and complete triumph of the Union arms, yet, precisely 
at this critical juncture, his plans were totally discon- 
certed and his power completely paralyzed by a new re- 
bellion suddenly outbursting in the Northern States. 
The remainder of the history is soon written. Civil war 
presently raged from one end of the country to the other. 
The East was arrayed against the West, and a party in 
the "West was in secret alliance with the South. The 
position of the Union armies in the Southern States be- 
came most critical. They fell back, closely followed by 
the Southern insurgents. Washington was lost. The 
central government was broken up. The Union was 



32 

practically dissolved. Soon, in the confusion which fol- 
lowed, the component elements of this once magnificent 
nationality became so bitterly and irreconcilably hostile 
to each other as to render reconstruction hopeless, and 
thus the greatest republic of ancient or modern times 
miserably perished." 

If, Mr. President, the record of our downfall is to be 
written, it will, as I most sincerely believe, be written in 
terms like these. But I will not yet believe that it is to 
be written at all. My faith is yet strong in the virtue of 
the people. If it were equally strong in their vigilance, 
or in their zeal in the cause in which they have so much 
at stake, I should have no misgivings. Still hope pre- 
dominates over apprehension; and when, to human view, 
the clouds around us seem darkest, my trust is in God. 
Surely He cannot permit this giant iniquity to triumph ! 
Surely He will reward our patience and our perseverance 
at last. Surely the time cannot be distant when He will 
restore to us the blessings of peace; and along with 
peace will give us back our country, and our whole 
undivided country. 

I am, sir, respectfully. 

Your obedient servant. 



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